Summize, an innovative aggregator of products reviews

ReadWriteWeb has a really good review of Summize, an innovative aggregator of products reviews. Summize claims to aggregate 4 millions user reviews on 1 million products… Their coverage seems pretty good, but that’s not the big thing. The big thing is the UI !!!

Forget the 5-stars pattern to know if a product is good or not, Summize uses a data visualization technique to give you an idea of the full spectrum of reviews attached to a product.

The concept is great, and the implementation is really nice. Current (big) weakness: the full-text search algorithms don’t work very well:

• Currently, a search on “Canon EOS Rebel XTI” or “Canon EOS 400D” (different names for the same – very popular – digital camera) doesn’t bring any result!
• Currently, a search on “Canon EOS” ranks accessories above digital cameras themselves.

I hope Summize will fix their search engine very soon, as it currently gives a bad user experience to this innovative service.